9-Year-Old's Conn. Letter to Police Gets Response

A 9-year-old Connecticut boy who saw cars whizzing down his neighborhood street as he waited for the school bus each day did what a lot of adults might not have done. He took action.

Isaiah McLoughlin, of Waterford, Conn., sent a handwritten letter to his local police department asking officers to, in part, call his grandmother "so we can talk about the situation."

Isaiah's grandmother, the third-grader's primary guardian, said she encouraged him to write the letter.

"He's been talking about it to me for months," Millie Mell said of the speeders that "fly" down their residential road at speeds as high as 60 m.p.h. "I said, 'Alright Isaiah, maybe you should write a letter to the police yourself and tell them about the speeders.'"

Courtesy Millie Mell

Isaiah, who signed his note with a congenial, "Your friend, Isaiah," put the letter in the mail on Monday and the very next evening, the department's youth officer, Nicole VanOverloop, came to Isaiah's house to discuss his concerns.

"She talked to him about the speeding and that she was proud of him that he wrote the letter and would pass the information on to the traffic officer and they would come out and ticket the speeders," Mell said.

Sure enough, according to Mell, as she and Isaiah waited for the school bus this morning, an officer was stationed on their street with a radar gun.

"He was a very busy man," Mell said. "He just kept going back and forth with his lights on, pulling people over."

Mell described Isaiah as "very pleased" with the results of his letter but she says there is a bigger lesson for everyone in the actions of her 9-year-old grandson.

"I think it's a great lesson for everybody that if you see something you don't like - that's either illegal or unjust - you can speak up and get results," Mell said. "We all get a little jaded, but maybe three or four people will go slower or they won't go down our road and it'll make a difference."

Waterford Police Department officials were not immediately available for comment.